Friday, April 24, 2015

--I AM STALLING. I AM GOOD AT STALLING

Disappearing Acts

Act
1

That’s Right

The children at the next table were
cackling as they played, fists slapping “One-Two-Three. Rock-Paper-Scissors.” Their mother waited in line to pay her bill. She was pretty, but defeated and
worn-looking, as if some poltergeist had ravaged her, flung her and flung her
until she was so shaken that she no longer cared how she appeared.

The man rose and stood over the
children, his shadow a machete blade across their Formica table.

The boy looked up, a brave defender
of sisters, his fist clenched, jaw set, a sneer forming. The boy in no way resembled the man’s son
who’d disappeared all those years ago, yet he said to the kid anyway, “That’s
right. Just like that and you’ll be
fine.”

Act
2

Missing You

Your face is a song I know by heart,
pedaled chords with a sweeping finish.
Your fingers, eyebrows… cheekbones high but not yet so strong—I know
these, too. I wish you’d giggle some
more, your living laughter, it sluices through my gut like a sick soup of sin
and razors, but I’ll take that kind of pain any day.

When you look up from reading your
cereal box, I see the identical lids and nose I once kissed, and a yearning
like death’s strong hand pulls me down the way it did your mother.

“What is it?” you ask. “Is something wrong, Dad?”

Act
3

Disappearing
Acts

She had many little ones the size of
freckles but the biggest wart would not stop growing. In time it looked like the head of small
cauliflower. Her mother told her to quit
whining, said it was nature’s way of pushing the toxins out. Her mother was always going on about evil and
the sin nature, though she was in no way religious. Since the divorce, her mother had become more
and more fearful of disease, contamination, and germs, so it was hardly
anything when she stopped hugging or kissing her daughter.

After awhile the girl decided to
have the warts removed. She went to see
someone, a young, lithe doctor with long amber hands, his Indian accent as
yummy as caramel. He told her she should
try wrapping the warts with duct tape.
“I know, I know. It sounds nuts,
but it works.”

Indeed it did. All the small ones disappeared but she did
not apply tape to the monster wart. She
kept recalling the doctor’s voice, so sticky and sweet pressed that close in
her ear, his corduroy trousers giving off heat as he leaned in to examine her
fingers.

He smiled when he saw her again in
his office, and this made her sigh so hard that she had to cover her mouth to
disguise her relief.

“So my remedy did not work?”

“It did, partially,” she said, the
fib a partial one as well. She held up
the forefinger with the wart.

“All right then. It’s no big deal.” She felt a bee’s nest knocking over in her
head, his voice making her insane.

She did not squeal or flinch when he
injected her with the needle. The sharp
prick and digging pain felt instead like a love potion.

As he bent over her with a soldering
gun to burn the now-frozen wart off, she did the unthinkable. She touched her lips to his glossy topaz
forehead. It wasn’t a kiss. A kiss involves lip movement and transfer of
pleasure. No, this impulsive act of hers
was one-sided.

He scooted his wheelie chair back
and she said how sorry she was, then her heart dropped and disappeared the way
the wart just had when he said, “Don’t be.
It happens all the time.”

Act
4

Here! Now!
Alive!

The girl at the coffee shop was
reading an article about suicide in Seattle, holding her cup beneath her chin
so that steam misted her glasses and cheeks, giving an impression of
consecrated gloom.

The boy took a seat on the lumpy
loveseat catty-corner and pretended to read a book of poetry by John
Donne. He looked up repeatedly like a
wary squirrel, each time further stunned by the girl’s grief and how it colored
her with a rare, tragic beauty. He
thought of great paintings he had seen in books and magazines and how it was
doubtful he’d ever witness them in the flesh.
This girl and those masterpieces seemed to share the same sort of
untouchable splendor. But then he
reminded himself, I am here! Now! Alive! seated just inches from this sullen
loveliness.

He looked up, scooted forward and
opened his mouth to speak but the girl had stood by then, moving toward the
door with urgency and purpose.

Her backpack lay at the foot of her
chair where she’d forgotten it. Perfect,
the boy thought. He picked the bag up
and trotted across the room. Opening the
door, he hesitated, wondering what words to use. He was so good at messing up.

He watched her stride to the edge of
the curb, no longer looking sad, but rather, staring ahead with a glimmer of
optimism in her smile.

It’s now or never, he thought. Be brave.

He opened his wordless mouth, horrified,
stymied as he watched the girl take a short leap from the curb into the path of
a speeding bus.

Act
5

Self Portrait

I know my mother is crazy because
she keeps working on the same white painting, hours and hours she will go at
it, layer after layer of oily white, plastering, adding more white, coaxing
nothing from it but the same stark white.
Then one day when I come home from school I see the easel but not Mother
and I know her masterpiece is complete, that she’s gone and done what father
had always accused her of, painted herself nonexistent.

Act
6

Stunt Man

He burst into the coffee shop like
an explosion and we all grabbed each other or our table. His hair was infested and long, his eyes
spinning manic. He screamed, “I’ve got a
bomb!”

The barista behind the counter
looked at him, then to the line of crouching customers. “Who’s next?” he asked.

Act.
7

Long Hair

He looked so different without it,
thin, aged, an unfamiliar patch of pale skin consuming his cheek. She remembered his hair golden and wavy like
sheets of taffy. Underwater when they
were young and neighbors it floated like fingers reaching her way. Chums then, they’d play Marco Polo, pool
water crying down his chest, her not hiding with the others, just staring at
his dripping long hair because his eyes were closed and she could.

She had chosen Ted as a decision in
favor of practicality. Now, these twenty
years later she leans across the casket and kisses her love for the first and
last time, not caring who sees or what their whispers say.

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I write--short fiction, long fiction, poetry. I love writers and all things writerly, but really I love you, or I will love you if you let me.
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